Your Right to Know

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, Ohio — As he shifted from policy wonk to salesman yesterday, Gov. John Kasich
posed basic questions to the state legislators who will consider his proposed two-year budget,
which has a gradual $1.4 billion tax cut as its centerpiece.

“What the legislature has to decide is, can we help small businesses significantly, and
secondly, can we lower our income tax?” Kasich said after the second of two town-hall meetings
designed to promote his tax plan.

“And the question at the end of the day is, if you don’t want to do it my way, that’s OK, but
you need to do it some way,” Kasich said. “So the question for the legislature is gonna be, how do
you feel about a program that I think is fair, is broad-based and can help us to get there to
provide more economic growth for Ohio?”

As Kasich begins to make his case for his budget to the GOP-controlled legislature, he picked up
an endorsement from anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist is the
author of the pledge that many conservative lawmakers sign not to raise taxes.

Norquist’s group wrote to the legislature yesterday in support of Kasich’s tax plan, which would
cut the income tax for all Ohioans by 20 percent over three years, reduce income taxes an
additional 50 percent on the first $750,000 in income for business owners, and lower the state’s
sales-tax rate from 5.5 percent to 5 percent.

Kasich’s plan also includes a one-time income-tax cut of 4 percent because of a state surplus
expected to reach $1.4 billion by June 30. But Kasich also proposes a broadening of the sales-tax
base that would generate $3.1 billion in additional revenue over two years by lifting the tax
exemption on many service industries, and he also has reintroduced his plan to raise the severance
tax on oil and gas wells created through “fracking.”

“Gov. Kasich’s proposed tax changes are very positive and very pro-growth, and they are
reflective of the direction the country is going, especially in the Midwest,” Joshua Culling,
government-affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform, told
The Dispatch. Culling said lowering Ohio’s income-tax rates by “broadening the sales-tax
base and lowering (the sales-tax) rate is a very fair way to go about taxes.”

Accompanying Kasich to both his “Tax Cut Town Hall” in Columbus on Monday night and again
yesterday to Applied Metal Technologies in Brooklyn Heights, outside Cleveland, was conservative
Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, who called Kasich’s tax plan a “eureka moment” for
Ohio.